Denise Koch, the last remaining anchor link to the golden era of Baltimore TV news, delivered a nice report the other night on the still-gestating Baltimore Banner, and in the process a rather poignant picture of life and death in local media.
The Banner is the online local news effort that’s been years in the making. The attempt goes back more than a decade, when Ted Venetoulis and Bob Embry were trying to pry loose The Sun from its Chicago Tribune ownership.
The effort finally found life when Venetoulis and Stewart Bainum, thwarted by Chicago, instead started putting together The Banner. Look for it sometime next spring, strictly digital, every day.
And look upon it as the future of journalism bidding farewell to the exhausted past.
In her report, on WJZ’s “Eyewitness News,” Koch mentioned the demise of many of America’s newspapers, but she slipped delicately around the simultaneous decline of local TV news.
What’s happened at The Sun is true of hundreds of newspapers. In its modern heyday, The Sun’s daily circulation hovered somewhere around 200,000. Today, it’s down to about 26,000 in print and 75,000 online.
But the same is true about local TV news. In its Jerry Turner/Al Sanders heyday, WJZ was drawing about 500,000 viewers to its evening broadcast. Today, they’re doing cartwheels if they draw 50,000 people.
Into this comes the Bainum-financed effort, minus Venetoulis. When Venetoulis, the former Baltimore County executive, died a few weeks back, it had the feel of something biblical about it: all those years Ted guided the effort to breathe new life into local journalism, only to die just as the long journey’s about to reach the Promised Land.
But his loss represents something more: a wise hand who understood the hometown in its blood and bones. Bainum’s heart is in the right place. As he told Koch, when he served in the Maryland General Assembly about three decades ago, there were platoons of reporters covering the place full-time. Now, there’s a scrappy handful remaining.
“How can a community govern themselves when they don’t know what’s going on?” Bainum said.
In its heyday, The Sun’s newsroom brimmed with more than 400 editorial people. Now, about 80. And under new management out of Chicago, it’s likely to fall even lower.
Bainum’s talking about starting with 50 reporters at The Banner. That gives the effort some legitimacy right out of the starting blocks. (Local TV news operations, by comparison, have never had more than about two dozen on-air reporters.)
The question is, where has the audience for news gone? Are people content with the diminished coverage they’re getting out of the old media?
Can The Banner breathe new vigor into the local news business, and in the process some new vigor into the community it will call home?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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